Concrete abstracts: Meet the Israeli woman using AI to reinvent the real estate industry

The kind of project that lands you in interior design magazines. The kind of client who doesn’t ask the price.
Then her phone rang.

Her sister was calling from Beersheba, and she was crying. She was buying an apartment priced at NIS 1.5 million, but she was in tears because the developer had handed her a single piece of paper – a 2D floor plan – and she had no idea what she was actually buying.

“I don’t know how to read the plan,” her sister said.
Gal, who had spent her career helping the ultra-wealthy visualize their dream homes, was floored. “Why are you crying?” she asked. “This needs to be the happiest time of your life.”

Her sister stopped crying, signed the contract, and moved in. When a buyer came along six months later, offering her half a million more than she’d paid, she sold, called Gal again, and started over.
That phone call from Beersheba became the founding document of HIWAY, an AI-powered real estate platform that enables buyers to walk through apartments that haven’t been built yet, redesign them in real time, and make million-dollar decisions with their eyes open. 

She decided that wasn’t good enough for anyone.
The problem wasn’t that the technology to fix this didn’t exist. It was that nobody had thought to bring it to Israel.

The solution Gal envisioned wasn’t modest. She wanted to take the kind of technology being used in gaming engines and Hollywood production studios and put it in the hands of a first-time apartment buyer. 
She wanted people who had never read a floor plan to be able to stand inside their future home, look around, and know what they were buying.

She also wanted to build it with her two daughters.
It wasn’t a purely sentimental decision. Gal’s daughters are, by any measure, formidably qualified. 
Third-generation architects with roots at the Technion, their grandfather was CEO of one of Israel’s most prominent construction firms, and their father runs a leading architecture practice.

Between them, they have degrees in architecture, law, and marketing from Reichman University. 
“They knew everything about building,” Gal said simply. When she decided to bet everything on this idea, she didn’t go looking for co-founders. She turned to the people already sitting across from her at dinner, the women she raised to be as formidable as she is.
Together, the three of them built HIWAY, creating algorithms that enable buyers to experience an apartment that doesn’t yet exist.

And then, the buyer can start making changes. Swap the flooring. Move a wall. Switch the kitchen finishes from matte white to warm wood. 
The changes render in real time, instantly, so buyers can see exactly how each decision affects the feel of the space.
It’s the kind of service Gal used to offer exclusively to clients spending tens of millions. Now it’s available to anyone and works for every budget. 

Her sister in Beersheba had used Gal’s original visualizations to meet her carpenter with a precise brief: this size, this style, this finish – but at a price point that worked for her. 
The design's atmosphere carried through even when the materials didn’t. “You make a new collection for your budget,” Gal explained, “with the same atmosphere.”

The accessibility of the program is, in Gal’s eyes, an essential part of HIWAY’s purpose.
She follows a similar model to that of the fashion house Zara, which tapped the world’s top designers and made their aesthetic available to everyone. “I took me,” she said, “and I said, ‘Okay, now I’m going to make myself accessible to a truck driver.’”

Her daughters, it turns out, felt exactly the same way. “They don’t come to work for me,” Gal said of her team, her daughters included. “They come to work for HIWAY.” 
The product is theirs as much as it is hers. Three women from the same family, three builders, making something new.
When Yael Gal walked into her first meetings with Israeli real estate developers, she came armed with a revolutionary product, a decade of elite design experience, and the kind of self-confidence that fills a room. It wasn’t always welcome.
“One of the developers said, ‘Yes, you have a great project, but why? You are beautiful,’” she said, detailing time after time that she was mistreated or outright ignored because she walked in without apology, without deference, or without showing the uncertainty a developer might have expected. 

“He thought I was arrogant,” she said about one man. “Why do I have so much self-confidence?” 
Three months later, after word spread that her product was moving apartments in a stalled real estate market, the man called her. Politely. He had a project. Could she do her best work?

She could. And she did.
“When they take the first chance and use the product... boom,” she said. “Then they don’t question you. They don’t see you as a female. They see you as a moshiach.” 

The skepticism she faced wasn’t about her product. It was about her. And the way she survived it wasn’t by hardening, by making herself smaller, or by finding a man to stand in front of her. 
She survived it by doing what her mother had always done.

Gal’s father, a salaried man with a steady job and a cautious disposition, once told his wife he’d bring her cigarettes in jail when one of her business ventures alarmed him. 
Her mother laughed. “She said, ‘You don’t need to bring me cigarettes to jail. We’re going to have a lot of money from this.’” 

“She was sweet,” Gal said. “You don’t need to be masculine to get power. She was always making a nice atmosphere, warm, like a leader, and everybody wanted to do something for her.”
Her mother was also beautiful, Gal noted – and in love. “They said if you are a strong woman, the boys will not come to you. But I saw my mother. She got love. She got the love of the people.”

She got something else, too. She got her daughter’s lifelong admiration and a blueprint for how to build.
“She taught me to dream big,” Gal said. “The biggest courage a person can have is the courage to dream big. You need to be brave, to say, ‘I can do it.’ I was brave enough to think and believe in myself. And this is the advice I give to my daughters.”

The advice didn’t stay abstract. It became a company. When Gal made the daring decision to walk away from a flourishing design career, with real money and real recognition, a life she had spent years building, she thought of her mother standing in that salon, taking out loans, laughing at the doubters. 

I hung my ego in the closet,” she said. “Otherwise I couldn’t have built this company.” She took her savings, bet on her idea, and called her daughters.
Three generations of women who built things. Each one was watching the one before her and deciding to be braver.

Five years after Gal made that leap, HIWAY is no longer a start-up knocking on doors. The doors are opening on their own.
The Diaspora market is where Gal sees some of the most significant opportunities. Jews and Israelis living abroad – in New York, Miami, Los Angeles – have always bought property in Israel but have historically done so with even less visibility than local buyers.
They can’t walk the neighborhood or stand in the apartment and feel the light. 
They make enormous financial and emotional decisions from thousands of miles away, based on photos, phone calls, and a piece of paper. 
HIWAY can ship a VR headset to a couple’s home in Manhattan and let them walk through an apartment in Jerusalem before they book a flight. 

“They can actually live in the apartment before they buy it,” Gal said. “With certainty. With excitement.”
The broader vision is, characteristically, not modest. Gal believes the industry is at an inflection point, that the generation of buyers now entering the market will simply refuse to do things the old way. 
Real estate, the last great holdout of the paper plan and the hopeful illustration, is about to catch up. “Nobody will buy an apartment without seeing it in VR,” she insisted. “Nobody. You need to see it. You need to feel it.”

She has been saying that for five years. Increasingly, the market is saying it back.
There’s a moment Gal will always come back to, even as her empire grows. It’s not the Miami conference or a call from one of Israel’s most prominent media figures telling her she’d solved a problem the whole world had. 

It’s simpler than that. It’s her sister, standing in a finished apartment in Beersheba – the one she’d walked through in a video before she ever signed anything – knowing exactly what she’d bought, and loving it.
That’s the product. Not the algorithm, not the VR headset, not the real-time rendering engine. The product is that feeling. Certainty where there used to be anxiety. Excitement where there used to be tears over a piece of paper.
Gal built it in five years, from the ground up. And she didn’t build it alone.

“People always want sons,” she said, with the particular calm of someone who has thought about this a great deal. “But my daughters built my company. I believe strongly in women’s power. Women can change the world.”
It’s a line that could be read as a slogan, except that in Gal’s case, it’s a literal description of what happened. 
Her daughters, third-generation architects with degrees in law, marketing, and design, are the engineers and architects of everything HIWAY has become.